The Ogres in Ohio

I tell you the burning maple leaves smell like toast, if it grew on trees, and the powder snow squeaks under your padded boots like confectioner’s sugar, like the coating on cheap marzipan—everything is good enough to set your stomach dead-firm against their food. It’s cold outside and the wind burns down your throat in face-whipping shots. It smells like grease inside that yellow kitchen, like decades of accumulated chicken-grease and paint and lumpy things sizzling in pans of margarine. It smells like orphan-dumplings and gingerbread. This is the kitchen of the ogre-god’s wife. They say she cooks children there, too, roasting them unevenly in the Luxe-Deluxe Grand-sized oven in a brisket nest of chopped carrots and frozen veg. And the smell’s so meaty-rich—like veal, of course, or bacon fat so rancid it’s gone sweet—the cooking smoke so dense with baby-fat and glaze you can catch whole gulping mouthfuls of it, just walking by downwind of the gutter vent, and the taste of it coats your tongue and your gums and the sides of your cheeks for days.